Eric is here with me. We formed a company called Overflow Labs, and we're developing a platform for game companies to be able to support open economies and player driven markets. Adrian and I have been involved in virtual economies for over twenty years, primarily in the MMO scale game space. What we have is you know, the the problem that game companies have had is this unmet player demand for virtual assets, resulting in what we term shadow markets. They're effectively unsanctioned, secondary, trading platforms. And so our goal is to enable developers to directly support and sanction these markets. You will give we give players provable asset ownership and transfer. We can explore this, you know, uncharted territory that results that when players can create their own products and marketplaces freely, in the games that they love. So

mhmm. Sorry. To add to that, we're actually having an NFT anniversary NFT labeled, anniversary coins auction tied to our one year anniversary. We have famous artists, including some supermodels and other well known people participating. So you you guys are most welcome to, again, join us.

Yeah. So I also saw that Joshua asked a question, are we still planning on building death and taxes? We would love to build death and taxes. We really, really hope that we still get a chance to do it. Right now, like, we've, you know, been swamped with just the development of the platform. And so we'll see see what comes or whatever. But, you know, the the the first hand governance implications of allowing players to, like, define these these marketplaces is still, you know, absolutely fascinating to us. You know, anytime you you have an economy, whether it's sanctioned or not, there's always some form of governance that springs up or whatever. You know? We've talked about that before. So it's it's interesting also because, you know, Roblox just recently did an IPO, and, you know, I think they're the they're the first mainstream company to bring forward this idea that, you know, players or people can create their own types of games or whatever and monetize them in in in ways or whatever, you know, that we're hoping to, like, bring mainstream to traditional studios.

Right. So, like, in order to build death and taxes, what what happened was we realized we had to build this platform to be able to support all these virtual economies and things like that. And then the feedback was that this would actually be really valuable for, like, normal developers as well. And so that's where our focus is at this moment in time. So

Hello? Any

Okay. So first, I apologize. This is today is Israel Independence Day, so there are some ceremonies I popped out of, and I have to go back. So I,

I have to go back. Yahoob. Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you. So I I gave a talk on digital social contracts, which was kind of a vision of of what what we would like to fix. If I can share can I share screen? Is this yeah. Okay. So that's if you can see that, our goal was to to fix our future digital society and our failing earthly democracies together. And I briefly, the report from since my talk a few months ago until now or almost a year ago maybe is that everything went in the wrong direction. So our feudal digital societies became even more frugal and our failing earthly democracies, except for The US, which turned for the better. At least in Israel, they're failing more miserably. And so I cannot report any any any actual progress, but I should say that my team what what what we what we realized the natural course of of events is has happened in my team, which is has very strong mathematical and and theoretical background. And also the fact that we we do want to develop systems and and methods which are well founded was that we go went deeper and deeper into into the theoretical foundations of of what are needed. And I'll show you a brief list of of our, kind of ongoing, ongoing work. Let let me see if I can find it here. Can you see this, screen? I'll also share the URL in the chat. So, basically, with the the problems will sound familiar, but the the but the questions that the our approach is probably quite different and radical from what's going on today. So we have a paper just came out on democratic forking, which is basically try to rationalize what's happening in cryptocurrencies, but not as a social process or as a a a a plutocratic process where the rich and powerful determine what's going on, but there's a democratic process for how how how forking can be rationalized as a as a democratic process. So that's an example of a paper. Let me just find the chat and I'll participants. Oh, I'm not sure where the chat button is right now. I'll I'll find it and and place the the the link later. Another another, problem which which may, again, sound familiar, but but we we look at it from from a foundational point of view is is what what in block in cryptocurrencies are called on chain governance. And, and we look at the theoretical foundations of how a constitution can be amended, within a constitution. And it turns out that even though this is a problem, has been thought about for for a few decades and and centuries even if we start from the American constitution, then it turns out that there's not much that can be relied upon and we we we then had had to to do a lot of foundational work and, and, which is reflected in in this paper. And, more generally, the the the questions that we we try to address are related to how to build what what are the building blocks, computational, mathematical, and eventually computational and software components that are needed to build digital communities which are self sovereign, democratic, egalitarian, where people participate in in in on an on an equal footing. I've just shared the link for for our papers. So those who want to get deeper are are welcome to do so. And those who want who may want to write me are are I'll be happy to to respond to any any comments and questions. But I should I should say that in contrast to the things that have been discussed here before and probably after, which are immediate, of immediate value and immediate interest, and maybe you can immediately make money out of them, then our work is is pretty foundational, theoretical, long term. And and given our goal of having a a Galatarian and just digital society, everything we do is open source and patented and aim to be used broadly. So so people who join my team must know that making money cannot be one of their goals, at least not as part of the work that they're doing we're doing together. So any questions on this? If you want me to get deeper into anything, I'll I'll I'll be happy to answer. Otherwise, I'll continue celebrating Israel's Independence

One quick question, doctor Spiro, if I may. What is the situation in Israel with respect to remote voting? Can people vote from their smartphones if they are disabled or if they are overseas, for example?

No. No. There's no digital no digital participation, only physical ballots. So and even not mailing. So people have to be physically in Israel and physically go to a ballot and physically put a note in in the ballot box.

You bet. It's a long way to go. Long way to

go. Well, yes and no. I think there are many, many issues with electronic voting which we can be discussed which can be discussed, you know, some other time.

But

I I I I think electronic voting is on the list of problems that Israel has to solve. Electronic voting is probably around 99 in the list or maybe even lower. So there's so many other more important problems we have to solve, including fixing our democracy. And and digital voting is not not the first one. Any other comments or questions?

couple months? Yes. So so there is that paper, but we are actually gonna revise it. It turns out that the mathematicas the mathematics there were was unnecessarily complicated, and we have a new mathematical model which will be even simpler. But it to the to the average reader, it'll look the same. I mean, the paper if you if you look at it from, you know, two feet, it will look the same. Only if you if you dug dig deeper into the math, then then you'll see the differences. But structurally, conceptually, everything will the foundations are there. And when I when I talk about building blocks, the the main some key results we have works. One is about egalitarian, just cryptocurrencies. We have a couple of papers on them where we want to show that you can have egalitarian minting as a foundation which could be a foundation for UBI, for universal basic income as opposed to rich, rich future dynamics, which exist today in cryptocurrencies. And we, of course, democratic governance on chain or democratic governance is is is key goal for us. And to support that, you need genuine identifiers. So a lot of our work is devoted to that. And, for example, the the the the questions of community formation and and constitutional communities and forking are are also addressed. So there are so many things that need to be addressed and and and in from a foundational way, and it turns out that our hands are full with them. So until we deliver working software that implements all these, probably will take some time. We have a lot of theoretical mathematical work to do and and our papers are reflected. And you're welcome to read. And if if you want to contribute later, to to actual implementation, of course, all have to be appreciated.

Well, we have at at the most abstract level, it's well, we have a program. It it to first approximation, it will look like users interacting with a smart contract. Okay? To a first approximation. And much of what we do can be realized by smart contract, but we want to do more and we want to do differently. And one of the things, we want to do differently is not is have the foundation that we that this builds upon the democratic and egalitarian as opposed to existing foundations for cryptocurrencies, which are plutocratic and nondemocratic and non egalitarian. So, and and comes with it slightly slightly richer math and and and language for describing, which is more distributed rather than centralized. But these are already kind of the finesse of computer science. But but to a first approximation, it will look like interacting with smart con with with, egalitarian and just, and democratic smart contracts. That's that's the first approximation. Okay. Thank you very much. I I really apologize that, I I when I accepted, I I forgot that that it's Independence Day. I said, sure. I'll take it because Wednesdays in the evening are free except today I'm not. So I'm sorry.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Bye bye.

And before that, I think I gave you a talk on the, Jungian archetypes in play in governance, which really deserves a revisit, but maybe not today. So, yeah, Thomas Cox. I chair p two one four five, which is the IEEE Standards Association's blockchain governance the standards group. We say blockchain, we actually mean DLT. Several of our members keep saying, my product isn't a blockchain. So but blockchain gets all the press and all the love, so we have to keep that in the name. So what what I was planning to do is give you a quick flyby of a bunch of stuff that's jumbling around in my head. And then wherever the questions come from, that's the interesting thing, and we could talk about it. And if none of it's interesting, we can just be done with you very quickly. So there are a couple things that are on my on my mind. One of which is that standards matter and how and why do standards matter for something like distributed governance. My claim is that we need a shared vocabulary much earlier than we need almost any other kind of standard, and there's six kinds of standards. Number two, I'm just getting very pessimistic about digital identity, and so I'm staking out, an extreme position and saying digital identity is the last thing you should want to provide or try to provide. I'll try to defend that thesis. I think you're better off settling for a probability cloud. Governance grows in predictable ways. We've got some work on a life cycle diagram that might be interesting to some folks, and I'm gonna claim that ontology recapitulates phylogeny, and I think I even know what those words mean. And, of course, everything starts as a dictatorship, which no one here will be surprised at. And then lastly, I have a thesis that the product of governance isn't decisions, which I've been saying it was decisions for, like, three years, and so I've changed my position on that. Rather, it's legitimacy. And I wanna mention Coleman's Authority Systems. So let's look at that. So I wanted to start with the the Cynefin framework, which I think most folks here have already seen. And if not, it's easy to Google. Cynefin being a Welsh word. That's why it's pronounced Cynefin, but spelled the way it's spelled. And so my my belief is that in the realm of chaos and, you know, cause and effect have broken down, that standards aren't gonna be even possible. And that as we fall out of chaos into the merely wildly complex where we're trying to make sense of things, the best thing we can do from a standards perspective is try to come up with terminology so that we can share our experiences and share our emergent practices as we discover them, and that any other attempt to standardize in a complex universe is probably fraught with risk. As the complex universe gets wrestled into more and more control through deeper understanding, it becomes more simply complicated, simply, where rather than having emergent practices, we can start finding good practices. And so we can get into the more modest standard levels of guides and practices. My the six types of standard are from the, the American Society for Testing and Materials or ASTM. And it is only when we get a world of simplicity and real cause and effect and best practices are possible that the remaining three types of standards, test methods, specifications, and classifications, start to make sense. And I can draw I can show you this in a different way using, Simon Wardley's, diagramming method. Some of you are familiar with Wardley maps. If you're not, you should. It's a very good system. And he suggests that all products go through an evolutionary movement from being what he calls Genesis, first person in the world to make one of these things through a custom build phase, into a product phase, and eventually into sort of a commodity or utility phase. And as that happens, you go from chaotic, uncertain, and unpredictable into highly known, measured, stable, and dull. And product standards can hurt you when you're all the way to the left, and they can start to help when you get more and more to the right. In fact, they become mandatory as you get far to the right because, another wordly ism, is to see how layers get built. And so, you know, the Parthian battery was the first time humans made an object that could hold electrons and begin to harness electricity, and then over time, that turned into a commodity where you just plug things into a wall and you pay by the month. And there's your commodity electricity. And as electricity becomes more and more of a commodity, it becomes possible to hand build a z three or some other computer and become the first computer on the planet or electronic computer anyway. And then computing becomes a commodity as it is today in in cloud computing. And as computers got went from left to right and became more of a product and more standardized, now you can build the very first database, and now databases are a commodity. As you see, these layers build on each other, and now commodity databases are powering things like intelligent agents, and then they'll eventually become a commodity too, unleashing yet more layers of who knows what coolness over time and risk, of course. And the point here is that standards on the far left are gonna be counterproductive. By the time you're getting into product creation, you need a standard vocabulary even though you there's really no room for anything else, But you actually can't build the next layer on the far right unless you got standards because you need reliable components that you can build on and not have to think about. And that's where standards, I think, really come into their own in terms of empowering innovation, is they they play a cleanup role of letting you wrap stuff under an API or some kind of layer of abstraction and not have to worry about stuff anymore. And I'm sure I will upset at least one person in the room when I suggest that, you know, how good does identity really need to be from an evolutionary perspective? Am I just categorizing entities into the three f's of food, foe, or mating opportunity? Or am I trying to actually remember the, you know, the individuals that are around me and favors that I owe or they owe me and potential for future reward threat on an individual cooperative basis? And as long as I can solve my personal needs for figuring out that, that may be all the, quote, unquote, identity I need. As we try to create blockchain based systems of shared reality, if you try to give everybody one identity, you're gonna start running into every corner case on the planet. And it might be simpler to say, how much identity do I need for my purposes right now, and how can I design systems that satisfy the absolute minimum identity needed by the players involved and no more? So I'm I'm arguing against the one true identity given by a government and more for a highly decentralized and ad hoc system of providing enough identity for folks to get on with life, which would, I think, lend itself more to, well, a decentralized world. And, again, I'm happy to be wrong. I'm also happy to defend that. Life cycle, This is illegible, but I have some zoom ins. Big picture here, there's a governance design process that I think I've identified in blue, governance maturity phases that match that in red, and then some governance artifacts in the center. This is usually permissioned stuff. So let's zoom in a bit. I'm not sure if that's even legible. But there's sort of a strategy phase in design where you're trying to come up with your preconstitution decisions about, like, well, what's the purpose of this project? And, you know, how will skin be put into the game and what economic value will be created and so forth, and then constitution decision making and legislative decision making, and these artifacts start to show up. And off on the right, I suggest that there's, you know, some fairly immature governance at first because it's just you or you and some buddies, and eventually, you need to turn that into something where people feel a sense of buy in. And as you go further, you know, time is flowing downward in this rather unconventional diagram. And at some point on the maturity side, you have to have an end to your cabal leadership and more of a participatory game. Otherwise, you're not really decentralized. You're just a service provider. At some point, you got your first production usage of your system. And then after that, on the right, I'm gonna suggest that there's a sort of a late scaling cutover where, like, VeChain gives up control to its members or Cardano gives up control and so forth. Maybe an easier way to show this interchange is now time is going left to right. Sorry. I'm flipping things. I'm suggesting there's a depth of commitment where the visionary founder and the cofounder are the first ones in, and they have very deep commitment because they're spending all this time inventing things. And then you're cocreating early stakeholders, a little less deep, but still pretty deep in the in terms of commitment because they have to do a lot of decision making. And at some point, you've got your initial governance comes online, and the people who join after that are your early majority in the sense of, you know, diffusion of innovation curve type thinking. And so they've still got some commitment, but it's not as deep. And mostly, they want a level playing field and a clear offer of, like, what am I joining here and what good is it gonna do me? And then you get your late majority stakeholders who show up, you know, near near the end. Meanwhile, there's a layer of transactional customers across the top who I I will claim ought to have no voice in government or governance because their choice is to either work with you or go somewhere else. And only when this becomes a monopoly, should they have a voice. And there's also a spot here for people who all they do is stake or all they do is integrate an API. They don't do any other real investment into the system, so they have very little skin in the game, and I would claim that their rights to decision making power should be fairly light. And then the fourth thing I wanted to throw out for general thinking is, what's the output of governance? And I'm gonna claim it's not decisions. It's legitimacy. I think it was somebody here in this group suggested Coleman's authority systems paper from 1980. Pretty dense. It'd be one of the things he mentions is there's two things that members or potential members of an authority system, including a blockchain, including a decentralized collective can do. One is vest or join, the other is divest or leave. And within the system, we've got positions of authority, maybe. If we do have positions of authority, they're usually roles assigned to agents, and the system itself generally wants to achieve some sort of outcome and attract and retain members. So the governance system has to not alienate members or else it won't attract and retain them, and the governance system cannot appear corrupt or it'll fail all of its goals. Okay. So I apologize for that whirlwind tour of the inner recesses of my brain, but I'm wondering if anything jumps out at anybody, could you type it into chat, and then we can either talk about it or move on to the next person. Thank you for, letting me play.

Yeah. Right. My guess is that we're not gonna see in in the decentralized governance space any vendor lock in. I think the technology platforms are just a little too scattered for us to be seeing that, and governance is such a detached layer from that. I mean, you can use almost any governance scheme with almost any technology within limits. And people jealously safeguard their right to opt out of systems. So when it comes to governance, I I really am not too worried about any kind of vendor lock in. What I am seeing is a real sort of explosion of different terms to mean the same basic thing, making it very hard for different projects to talk to each other or members of different projects to hold meaningful communication. And so we're actually working on a set of early definitions of key terms with their synonyms to try to walk people through, you know, here's how governance tends to play out, and here's all different words people use to mean basically the same thing. And what we what we're what we're facing is more of a we wanna be following the other projects to see what words they already use because there's no point in making up brand new words when you've got existing words people use. And then if we have to sort of merge things, we'll do our best to guess what would work for folks. But when it comes to language, everyone, like it's very hard to be the language police. Like, the French and the Turks try to do that. They both have government agencies that define what is French and what is Turkish, and they have a hard time actually making anyone believe them. And English famously has no central body of authority. I mean, the Oxford English Dictionary folks just basically said, we're gonna track what how people use the language. We're not gonna try to tell them what they should do, and that's we're very close to that. We're gonna do our best to with p two one four five is to track actual usage and then codify that and make it available and popularize it and share it as widely as we can and try to hope that people want to do a shelling point conversion on a set of terms so they can have, meaningful dialogue. Wish us luck.

Okay. Let's see. Fair launch networks and upload a product. Could have a framework, David Snowden, keynote speaker for yeah. Snowden is flipping genius. Any chance you get to go listen to David Snowden? I would urge anyone to take that.

That's brilliant. And let's see. Consumers don't need steak, except when there's a monopoly. Yeah. Nick, you may have to walk me through your question a little bit.

May maybe I'm I'm misquoting you, but I thought I remembered you saying that this sort of the external layer in your in your chart there.

Yeah. I was suggesting that a transactional customer, I wouldn't give them a stake in a system or or governance rights in a system if they've already exercising free choice over multiple vendors in a relatively free or somewhat unconstrained market, even a duopoly. It's only when the choice to switch providers is harder and harder does it make sense to, I think, expect of them the burden of governance because being involved in governance is a pain in the butt, and if any of you live in a condo and have a homeowners association. But try to imagine having 82 homeowners associations that you belong to all of them, and you have to somehow weigh in on all of them because you've got decentralized governance for the electric system and the gas system and all these different cloud providers providing you with different services. And somehow you have stake in all of them because it's all decentralized. And now I gotta show up at committee meetings. It's like, come on, man. I'm trying to, like, buy toothpaste here. I'm not trying to, you know, spare me because we we we've all got limited cognitive load capabilities, and governance is a big cognitive load. So, I mean, you can try to get all your transactional customers in there and give them governance rights, but, you know, a, you run the risk of getting Boaty McBoatface. Some of you have heard the story. There there was a popular vote for how to name Arctic exploration ship, and they threw it out to the British public. And the far and away vote winner wasn't, like, the Hermes or some, you know, boat like name. It was Boaty McBoatface.

You've brought that up before, but I think

that's It's one of my favorite stories. I think

you do for the opposite reason.

Well, I know it's opposite. I mean, it's like, hey. You you want the public to name stuff? We'll go with funny. You know? Whatever captures the imagination. And they don't care if it makes the people on the boat feel stupid or or, you know, the people who donated a million dollars feel like they got ripped off. It's like, hey. You asked for my vote. I gave you my vote. What did you want? And we also sent Taylor Swift to a a college for the deaf, which I thought

Just quickly, what does it look like to add that participation in afterwards when it hadn't been designed? Like, now suddenly, you don't have consumer choice. Now you have to add that in. Well, how does that work?

Well, I I might give you a prediction. I'm not saying that there's one true way it ought to work. But most likely, the population who are the monopoly cons consumers of a monopoly provided service are gonna be very anxious about being gouged as they should be, and are very likely to turn to whatever their terrestrial government is and say, so public utility commission, what do you say? And all of their elected representatives will salute because there's votes to be had, and your monopoly provider will become a regulated entity, which is probably not a bad thing to have happen. By the way, when things get all the way to the right on the wordly map sorry. All the way to the right on the wordly map, the margins shrink to near zero, And you get intense competition and little bits of innovation and a lot of, you know, lean six sigma kind of squeezing pennies out. So it's it's not a place of dynamism. It's a place of just rock solid stability, and no one even thinks about electricity until the lights go off. Right? That that's what the service turns into. And you've got people who make their careers getting a master's in, you know, electrical distribution, and they go and work for the electric company for twenty years and get a pension, and all they do is keep the power going. You know, we're gonna see a lot of that, more and more not just electricity and plumbing, but compute and and other virtual services.

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